Ultimate Winter Salad with Maple Tahini Dressing
Dearest Gentle Reader,
Can you tell I just finished Bridgerton? I couldn’t resist…
First up some housekeeping. If you haven’t watched my new YouTube series, It’s Not Complicated, here is the link. If you like it, please subscribe! The recipes featured in the show (like today’s Ultimate Winter Salad with Maple Tahini Dressing) will always follow in my Substack emails on Tuesdays. Upgrade to paid if you’d like to access those recipes (I’d love to give everything away for free, but now that I am doing this all on my own, Momma’s gotta earn a living).
Anyhoo, let’s talk salads. BIG salads (my favorite kind). My favorite comfort food is actually salad. Does that sound crazy? I love the crunch, I love a good, tangy dressing. I love the mass quantities. I love shoving it in my face, because let’s be honest, there’s no elegant way to eat a salad. After I’ve been away from home, whether on a work trip or a vacation, I come home and order a salad (my go-to is the kale salad from Westville and I eat it at least once a week).
When I was a kid, I loved to go to a salad bar. For my birthday one year, I asked to go to Rax, (think Arby’s) because I really liked their roast beef sandwiches and they also had a salad bar. We would frequent Shoney’s for their salad bar, as well as the Golden Corral. My number one choice though was Brunetti’s, a locally owned, family restaurant that had, you guessed it, a salad bar. The kids salad bar was only 99 cents with the purchase of a kids meal and let me tell you, they lost money on this kid. I would make no less than three trips to the bar, piling my plate high with chopped iceberg, shredded carrots, broccoli florets, salty sunflower seeds, bacon bits, and cover it all in creamy ranch dressing. Mmm. My mouth is watering just thinking about it. I vowed that if I was ever rich someday, I would install a salad bar in my home. (Later, I would also vow that if I ever hit it big, I would also drink champagne every day. As well as I have done in my career, neither of these markers of success have yet occurred, so I still have work to be done.)
I may not have a salad bar, but very often, I make myself a big salad. I love when I have time to go to the farmers market and buy what looks good. My best salads usually have a sweet element (like a fruit), a funky cheese (like blue or feta or Gouda), and a nut or seed. It’s nearly spring, but winter greens are still all over the market, and I love their bitter flavor (I think they taste like the weather). Recently, I made what I am calling my Ultimate Winter Salad with Maple Tahini Dressing. It is so good — I couldn’t stop eating it. I like to have my salads on a big metal mixing bowl that I call my trough because I just sit and shovel it in my mouth.
Hope you enjoy this salad as much as I do, and make it your own with whatever veggies look good to you.
Yours truly,
xoKatie
Cook the Recipes from the Episode Below:
